To Tell Our Stories: Holocaust Survivors of Southern Arizona

By Jewish Family and Children's Services of Southern Arizona

During World War II's Nazi onslaught, six million Jews were systematically and brutally killed. Yet millions survived, their lives altered permanently by the terrors they faced. After the war, many left long-established homes to settle in Israel and the United States, hoping for renewal. These are the stories of survivors who have made Southern Arizona their home. Each is an intimate slice of the Holocaust as it occurred throughout Europe and the Soviet Union. And each story is a dedication to loved ones and friends lost and brutalized during a portion of history that has since defined 20th century history and modern-day genocide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jewish Family and Children's Services of Southern Arizona
• Release date: Jan 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005636098

Book preview

Table of Contents

also by jewish family and children's services of southern arizona

Copyright

dedication

introduction

preface

Liliya Beskina

Michael Bokor

Vilyam Bukhman

Frida Chausovskaya

Erika Dattner

Theresa Dulgov

Annique Dveirin

Walter Feiger

Yulia Genina

Paulina Goldberg

Wolfgang Hellpap

Valeria Himmel

Liza Iakover

Lyubov Krimberg

Ida Kvartovskaya

Pawel Lichter

James Lieber

Tsiliya Lipkina

Yakov Makaron

Boris Nayshtut

Mariya Nayshtut

Adelya Plotnikova

Mikhail Rabinovich

Klara Raykh

Sara Rozenfeld

David Rubinstein

Eva Siebert

Mary Sterina

Miklós Szilágyi

Manya Tepelboym

Mirjam Wheeler

Wanda Wolosky

Valentina Yakorevskaya

Rakhil Yakover

Ita Zeldovich

Maryasha Zlobinska

notes

also by jewish family and children's services of southern arizona

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To Tell Our Stories

Holocaust Survivors of Southern Arizona (Volume II)

История людей переживших Холокост,

проживающих в южной Аризоне

to tell our stories

Holocaust Survivors of Southern Arizona

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© 2022 Jewish Family and Children's Services (JFCS)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other mechanical or electronic methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for use as brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.

Translations from Russian to English by Richard Fenwick and Raisa Moroz

E-book developed by Richard Fenwick

Cover designed by Aimee Carbone, the RBDI Group, LLC

Cover photograph courtesy of Dylan Martin © Dylan Martin Photography

dedication

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This book is dedicated to the Holocaust Survivors

who made Southern Arizona their home,

and to the six million Jews

and the millions of other innocents

unable to tell us their stories.

introduction

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Raisa Moroz and Richard Fenwick believe passionately that we must never forget. This collection of stories, written by Survivors in Southern Arizona, is possible because of that shared commitment, respect and friendship, and their unique combination of expertise and life experience.

The Moroz family immigrated to the United States from Belarus in 1996 because of rampant anti-Semitism in what was then the Soviet Union. Raisa, her husband Valeriy, their two daughters, and her in-laws were aided by HIAS, an organization that rescues people whose lives are in danger for being who they are. Raisa’s parents and other family members joined them later. Along with hundreds of others from many countries, the family became U.S. citizens in 2001.

Jewish Family and Children’s Services of Southern Arizona helped the Moroz family make this challenging transition. They were resettled by the agency, and Raisa was hired by JFCS for her first job in the U.S. She then joined the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona staff for almost 12 years. She returned to JFCS in 2009 as a Case Manager for the Holocaust Survivor Program and became the Program Manager a few months later.

Raisa began asking her Russian-speaking clients to pen stories about their lives. She created a list of questions and they began writing. Raisa quickly realized that their stories would not be widely appreciated because of language barriers.

As luck would have it, Richard, a retired USAF Russian linguist, volunteered to partner with Raisa in 2010 to curate a collection of stories from Holocaust Survivors in Southern Arizona. He translated those written in Russian, transcribed verbally recorded stories as the project expanded, and reviewed stories written in English by Survivors from Western Europe. You will discover these autobiographical stories in this remarkable book.

Richard, a parent and grandparent as well, worked in the defense industry for six years after his Air Force retirement in 2000. He is a musician, writer and poet, and after leaving private industry he gave himself a few years to write, which resulted in a published book of poetry and another on the way. During that time, he also cared for his beloved mother and father.

He discovered JFCS, was introduced to Raisa, and her story project became their project, flourishing in the process. Richard also visits weekly with Russian-speaking Survivors, helps them with day-to-day translation needs, and provides logistics for group events. He loves the work and quickly developed great affection for the Survivors and agency staff he has befriended.

Their volunteer partnership continues with an open invitation to other Survivors in Southern Arizona to tell their stories. They look forward to a second edition of this book.

Fred Fruchthendler

Chair, Board of Directors

JFCS of Southern Arizona

Carlos A. Hernández MA, LCSW, CPHQ

President and CEO

JFCS of Southern Arizona

preface

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The Holocaust is often defined in sets of numbers. We read, for example, that six million Jews were killed as the Nazis brutally and methodically carried out the final solution across Europe. Reading further, we learn that this number represented fully two-thirds of the entire European Jewish population at that time. Yet numbers like this can become staggering, almost too difficult to wrap our minds around.

We agree that the numbers, the statistics, must be remembered. At the same time, we’re certain that a proper education of the Holocaust can only be gained when we combine those numbers with the personal accounts of survivors. The statistics remain in rote memory; but it is the personal accounts that make the terror of the Holocaust very real in our minds. It is worth insisting we pay attention to these accounts.

We began this project in 2010 as a way to introduce readers to the Holocaust as it transpired in the Soviet Union. The Nazis moved so swiftly across Belarus and Ukraine – Soviet Republics – that there was little time to establish a streamlined way to deport Soviet Jews to camps in the west. Undeterred, the Nazis found new ways to maintain their mandate: Jews unable to evacuate deeper into the Soviet Union were executed by firing squad or rounded up to be burned in barns. At Babi Yar, a ravine in Kiev, the Nazis and local sympathizers executed nearly 34,000 Jews in just two days. In Belarus, 90 percent of the Jewish prewar population was destroyed. Another statistic – but one you should keep in mind when reading accounts written here by Belorussian Jews living now in Southern Arizona.

As the project expanded, we determined to include the personal accounts of Eastern European Jews as well. Most of us are better informed as to what occurred in the Polish extermination camps, and how Jews from a wide swath of Europe were transported, selected, and summarily murdered upon their arrival at a camp. For this reason, these particular accounts will seem more familiar to you. You’ll also learn about less-organized concentration camps established in the Soviet Union, places such as Akhmetchetka and Domanevka in Ukraine.

We ask that you keep one important fact in mind as you read these histories: if you are a Southern Arizonan, these survivors are your honored neighbors. Some stories here are simpler than others, and some are more plainly written; all are the memories of childhood or teenage years. And all will touch your heart in various ways.

David will tell you, for example, how his grandparents were tossed into a well and left to die; Boris will explain his mother’s dilemma when forced to choose which child she’d save; Valeria will describe being a twin and a test subject in a death camp; and Walter will show you the ingenuity it took for a teenager to survive a labor camp.

We are not experts on the Holocaust; our normal function is to provide support to survivors in Southern Arizona as much as possible. However, as this project took root, we gained a tremendous amount of information related to the cold precision the Nazis used in implementing the destruction of millions of families.

One note: Germany’s invasion of Europe occurred in various years. They invaded Poland, for example, in 1939, but waited until 1941 to invade the Soviet Union and 1944 to occupy Hungary. This explains why survivors from varying countries use different dates when describing the Nazi onslaught in their country.

70 years have passed since World War II ended. We are fortunate and grateful to have this last generation of survivors in our midst to provide us the gift of their stories. We are convinced that every Holocaust survivor’s personal account represents one piece of a vast puzzle, and we thank those survivors who agreed to share their stories. We are, all of us, obliged to educate ourselves and our children, in any way we can, to the dangers of thinking less of another human based simply on belief and prejudice.

Raisa Moroz

Holocaust Program Manager

JFCS of Southern Arizona

Richard Fenwick

Holocaust Program Volunteer

JFCS of Southern Arizona

Liliya   Beskina

Russia

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Iwas born in 1929 in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. My father was a therapist and my mother was a housewife. On my father’s side I had three uncles and four aunts, while on my mother’s side I had three uncles and two aunts. I was twelve years old when the war began, and had just finished the fifth grade. We were at Pioneer camp on the Sea of Azov when we heard the news about the war, and returned immediately to Rostov-on-Don after that.¹

My father was drafted into the Army three days later and was sent to the front with four of my uncles. Four months later, as the Germans approached Rostov, we evacuated in railroad freight cars. The Germans bombed our train repeatedly as we traveled, but we finally made it to Makhachkala, where I finished the sixth grade.²  I would go to the hospital there to care for the wounded, along with other students. We fed them and wrote letters home for them. We helped in any way we could.

The German offensive in the north Caucuses continued into the summer of 1942. Once they were close to Makhachkala we evacuated again. This time we went to Alma-Ata, in central Asia.³  I finished the seventh grade there, in 1943. We were constantly hungry, even though my mother worked at home sewing belts made of leftover leather strips. I helped her make these belts.

Other than one letter, sent in July 1941, we hadn’t heard from my father for two years. Then later that summer a relative in Moscow read an article in Ogonyok about German brutalities that had occurred in the prison camp at Khorol, Ukraine.⁴  My father was mentioned in the article, which included his picture. This is how we learned he was alive. The Germans had taken him prisoner during the battle for Kiev and sent him to Khorol, where he was routinely tortured. He escaped the camp with the help of locals, who hid him in a potato pit for nearly three months until they could get him to a partisan unit.

When Khorol was liberated, in 1943, my father helped restore the city before leaving with the army. By the time the war ended, he’d gone as far as Prague, Czechoslovakia. Besides Ogonyok, his time in Khorol prison camp was detailed in a Red Army magazine. He was demobilized from the Army in 1946.

My father was haunted for the rest of his life with memories of the camp. He worked as a family doctor, but was arrested in January 1953 when the purge of Jewish doctors began. Several months after Stalin died he was rehabilitated and freed from prison.⁵  Several months after Stalin died he was rehabilitated and freed from prison.

The Germans also imprisoned my father’s brother, Semyon Veksler, in Kiev. He was a nearby village doctor. We only learned in 2002 that the Germans executed him along with the seriously wounded.

We returned to Rostov-on-Don following its liberation in 1944, and the war ended on May 9, 1945. Two years later I started at the medical institute, where I completed my studies in 1953. I worked five years in pediatrics, then 30 years with tuberculosis patients, first children and then adults.

I was reminded I was Jewish my whole life. Children in school teased me, and after I graduated from the medical institute I couldn’t find work right away for the same reason. I’d been promised a position in a children’s hospital after the hospital I worked in was converted for adults in 1975, but the senior doctor at the children’s clinic personally told me he wouldn’t give the job to a Jew. I had to stay at the adult tuberculosis clinic.⁶

Michael   Bokor

Hungary

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Iwas born in Budapest, Hungary, where I lived until the war ended in January 1945. There’d been growing anti-Semitism over the years in Hungary, and we were very restricted – even though I was a child – as to what we could and couldn’t do. I went to school there for eight years. The eighth grade was the most difficult because that was when we started wearing the stars. I managed to get through it because my parents were with me, although my father was mostly being used in forced labor. He came home every now and then, but my mother had to take care of me and my two sisters alone.

Things started getting really bad in about April 1943, when the Nazis took power in Hungary. That’s when Jews were enemy number one. We were persecuted and couldn’t go to school, so after eight years of school I tried to get a job as an apprentice. When the Germans finally occupied Budapest, all hell broke loose.

The Hungarian Nazis were worse than the Germans. We spent the end of 1943 into 1944 mostly in hiding, moving from one building to another to try to save ourselves. Our building had a big yellow star on it, and we weren’t allowed to leave during curfew. But a friend and I decided to go to a Swedish-owned house near the Danube River. Sweden was a neutral country which made this house a safe place to go. When it was still foggy early one morning, we took our stars off and left our apartments to get to that Swedish house. But once we got there they told us to come back with our families, so we returned home to do that.

I wish I’d had my family with me when I’d first gone, because near our building a Nazi SS soldier caught us and asked us to identify ourselves. Naturally we couldn’t, so he examined us. He had his bayonet against my back, but my friend took off running. He ran as fast as he could into our building, while the soldier stayed with me. The soldier yelled that if he didn’t come out they would take everyone in the building away.

He took us to German headquarters, not far from where we lived. An SS guard made us go upstairs, where another German officer lectured us as to what we weren’t allowed to do. He told another guard to take us to the Hungarian Nazi headquarters, known as the Arrow Cross in English.¹  My friend was one year older than me and was taken downstairs, where people went and never returned. I was told to go upstairs, to an empty room, where a man came in and beat me severely. My mouth and nose were bleeding and my teeth hurt. I was fifteen years old and crying. He left without saying a word. Then a tall blond man came in who said to me, Why are you here? I told him I had broken curfew, and he told me to leave and to tell the people at the gate that it had been a mistake, which I did. Then I ran home.

20 years later I was working in Los Angeles and met a Hungarian Jew who knew that blond man’s name. It turns out he was Jewish and had infiltrated the Nazi operation. Someone must have been watching over me, because I got out of that building. It was a miracle. Once you got caught like that there was no such thing as making it home.

About a week later they took my mother to a concentration camp. They raided our building and said that anyone over 15 had to go. At first it was 25 to 30 people, but every day after they’d take more. Within four or five weeks everybody had to go: men, women, and children. My friend and I went into hiding, and my mother was taken away. My sisters were twelve and eight years old, so at first they didn’t have to go, though later they did. They’d been put into a ghetto in the central part of Budapest, closed off except for one gate and guarded by the Nazis. My sisters stayed with my father’s sister, who was already there. They found a place in a basement, which was also used as a bomb shelter.

While my family was in the ghetto, my friend and I hid in the various bombed out apartment buildings in the city and took food from abandoned apartments. We were smart enough to think no one would search for us. We snuck from building to building at night and took food from pantries, but after about a month we ran out of places to go. I decided to go into the ghetto to be with my family.

People were dead or dying in the streets. I remember there was a pharmacy near us where a pile of dead bodies was stacked up like wood, yellow in color. People started burying their relatives in parks, but the graves were shallow and sometimes you could see a hand sticking out of the ground. That’s what it was like to live in the ghetto: stepping over dead people and not being able to do anything about it.

Starvation and contaminated water plagued the ghetto, and people there died from lack of food or disease. We slept on dirty floors with just a few blankets and occasionally had small amounts of food, like tomato soup and barley. To this day I won’t eat tomato soup. When someone died we’d go through their pockets, searching for food. Sometimes they had sugar cubes or cookies. We’d take whatever they had.

The Russians arrived on January 17, 1945, and broke through a wall in our basement. They entered the basement and went straight up the stairs to fight the Germans. They were actually Ukrainians, and they weren’t very nice to us even though we were wearing stars. They just shoved us aside and kept going. But we were free.

The next day we were in the streets looting, which everyone did. For me, this was the end of the war. Many feared that the Germans would return, and many of the Hungarian army guys suddenly became nice people. Some were hung from telephone and light poles, because there were Jews who took revenge. We found a lot of food in one house, so we took it and ate until we were sick.

My father, who’d been taken to a labor camp, had been a Hungarian soldier for years, but when these things started happening they converted him to use as forced labor. Around 1943 they took the uniforms away from the Jewish soldiers, who then had to wear yellow bands and work as laborers. Many of them died, and many were taken to Russia. That’s where my uncle died. My father happened to be a carriage driver as well, so he drove Hungarian soldiers various places. He was aware of where we were and how we were doing, but he could do nothing when my mother was taken away. He tried to find us, but we were in the ghetto and he couldn’t come in or out so we lost touch with him until after the war. My father and his entire labor group were put into a camp.

Both of my parents survived but came home separately. I was liberated in January 1945,